


old wounds fester

by eyes_like_a_miracle



Category: Soulbound - Fate's Hand (Web Series)
Genre: Character Study, Emotional Hurt, Grief/Mourning, Hopeful Ending, Hurt No Comfort, Mild Gore, Missing Scene, Self-Esteem Issues, again the only character who's ever actually present is ronja but. i need character tags lmao, again: sorta, i present to you yet another No Dialouge Fic, idk man i just love these characters, major major major spoilers for episode 39 so at least watch that far before you read this, sorta - Freeform, unless you don't care about spoilers lmao, we're not going to talk about how many hours I spent listening to Prom Queen on repeat for this lmao
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-28
Updated: 2021-01-28
Packaged: 2021-03-14 16:35:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29049276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eyes_like_a_miracle/pseuds/eyes_like_a_miracle
Summary: A missing scene from episode 39
Kudos: 2





	old wounds fester

**Author's Note:**

> in case you missed it the first two times: this fic contains Incredibly Major spoilers for episode 39 of the podcast, so unless you don't care about spoilers then watch at least that far first

_Well,_ Ronja thought as she watched her own tears drip onto the floor, _that could have gone worse._

At least she’d gotten what she’d wanted, in a manner of speaking. Boar wouldn’t be hung up on her anymore. Boar would be able to move on, to hate her in peace without clinging to childish thoughts of a romance that had never been reciprocated. This was – this was a _good_ thing, Ronja tried to tell herself, even as her tears soaked into her fur. This was the best outcome she could’ve hoped for, looking at the situation realistically, so why did it _hurt_ so much?

Ronja curled in on herself and pressed a hand over her mouth to try to muffle the sound of her sobbing. Boar had mentioned that he and Ronja’s mother were staying at the inn; Ronja didn’t want to risk either of them overhearing her breakdown and feeling guilty about it. It was better for everyone if they thought Ronja didn’t care, even though that was about as far from the truth as it could get. Another sob tore through her, wringing a shudder out of her in the process, and Ronja wrapped her other arm around her stomach. She’d thought she was okay – she wasn’t over it, obviously, but she had been doing _better,_ at least – now that she was actually living her life. But seeing Boar had brought back a hundred memories Ronja had tried to forget, and telling him about Thunder had been like losing her son all over again. His anger had been the final nail in the coffin, even though she knew perfectly well that he had every right to be angry at her. She’d dealt with plenty of angry men before, so it wasn’t even that; it was the betrayal and grief in Boar’s voice when he’d asked why she hadn’t come back. The worst part was that he’d been _right._ She should have gone back, even if it had meant her death, because maybe Thunder would have survived. At least she’d gotten a chance to grow up. Now, because of her, Thunder never would. Grief ripped into her, making her curl in on herself tighter and try with every ounce of self-restraint she had not to _scream._ She had spent years trying not to think about all this, through whatever means necessary, and now it was all being dragged back into the spotlight by the fishhooks of Boar’s disappointment. She could still smell the dirt she’d buried Thunder in, if she let her thoughts wander too far, could still feel the soil caked between her fingers because the only thing she’d had to dig with had been her bare hands. Fuck, Boar was right. She’d been such a pathetic excuse for a mother for the miniscule amount of time she had been one that she hadn’t even been able to dig her son a proper grave. She should have just gone back. Even though she’d only been eighteen at the time, Ronja had _known_ that she needed to go back. But she’d been scared, and too young to make a choice like that, so she hadn’t, and now Thunder was dead and Boar hated her and she felt like she was eighteen all over again, cold and exhausted and terrified.

Suddenly, the feeling of her prosthetic hand pressed against her stomach was too much for Ronja to handle. It was too cold; it felt too much like when she’d curled herself around Thunder in a desperate last-ditch attempt to protect him from weather he could no longer feel. Choking as she tried to breathe through grief and tears and regret alike, Ronja scrabbled at the marble, her hands both shaking too much to get a good grip on the smooth stone at first. Eventually she managed to get a hold on it and she clawed it from her arm, sending it skittering across the floor with the dull sound of heavy stone against wood. At least she knew it would more than likely be okay. It was a small mercy, all things considered, but at least she wouldn’t have to explain to the Shaman how she’d managed to fuck up the prosthetic. Ronja grit her teeth and bit back the urge to scream again. For one thing, she didn’t want to bring anyone knocking on the door – or worse, barging into the room – if they heard her and got worried. For another, Ronja could feel her magic fizzing and sparking just under her skin, her vision occasionally filming over purple as her agitation tried to manifest itself into a more physical form, and she refused to risk giving it an opportunity to escape. Her magic was an unpredictable creature on a good day, and the last thing Ronja wanted was to give it an outlet by accident and end up destroying something. There were so many people staying at the inn right now because of the Market; some of them were bound to be in the building, and given her tendency toward fire and lightning when a spell was a knee-jerk reaction, there was no way it would end well for anyone. And, if worst came to worst, what if Flint or Kali came back early and got caught in the blast? Even the thought of it made Ronja sick to her stomach, leaving her gasping for air in an attempt to keep her breakfast from coming back up. She’d never be able to forgive herself if she hurt anyone like that again, but especially not either of her friends. She had already taken the lives of too many people she’d loved by not being able to control her magic.

But she hadn’t, had she? Boar wasn’t dead. Her mother wasn’t dead, either, if Boar was to be believed, and there was no real reason to think he was lying. She was probably disfigured, after what Ronja had done, but _alive_ nonetheless. The only undeserved death Ronja had ever been directly responsible for was, apparently, her son.

The realization felt like a physical blow to the chest and it snapped something inside her, turning Ronja’s grief to rage. She had spent years suffocating under the weight of the guilt over what she had thought she’d done, grieving people who apparently hadn’t died at all, wishing she could apologize and believing she would never get the chance. And yet, when faced with that chance against all odds, she had still managed to fuck it up. During her entire conversation with Boar, Ronja had only managed to get one apology out, and even then it had been overshadowed entirely by everything else being said. Not that Ronja really thought that Boar would have accepted her apology in the first place, even if he _had_ registered it, but still. He’d acted like being exiled and losing her son and everything else the last five years had entailed hadn’t hurt Ronja, too. At least he hadn’t been there when she’d lost Thunder. He hadn’t had to bury their son.

Blindly, Ronja fumbled for her earrings, her vision blurring with tears that could have been a result of grief or anger or relief; she didn’t know anymore. She’d gotten the earrings as a way to keep them – Boar, her mother, and Thunder – with her, and as a reminder of what she’d done. But she’d been wrong. She hadn’t killed most of the people she thought she had. She’d grieved pointlessly for years, and she was fucking _tired_ of it. Ronja just wanted to be able to live her life without every goddamn mistake she’d ever made living in her shadow and nipping at her ankles every chance they got. Boar hated her; he would be moving on now. She’d be damned if she couldn’t at least try to do the same. Ronja tried to take the earrings out normally, but between the fact that she was still shaking and the fact that she only had the one functional hand at the moment, it didn’t work very well. She could feel her pulse in her fingertips, electricity starting to crackle around her as her frustration grew. Her heartbeat echoed in her ears like damnation. It was doing nothing to push away the grief that was trying to strangle her. After several long moments of fumbling uselessly with the earrings, Ronja growled and started to just pull on them. Honestly, she wasn’t expecting much to come of it, but then her claws caught on a particularly reckless yank and a flare of pain accompanied a sharp tearing feeling in her ear. She pulled harder, and one of the earrings came away in her hand, along with a sizeable chunk of her ear. The pain triggered a fresh wave of tears, and she couldn’t help the involuntary yelp she let out, but she dropped the earring to the floor beside her and reached back up for the next one. The second earring came away easier, though it hurt more. To be fair, that was probably because she’d dug her claws in earlier and shredded most of the upper half of her ear in the process before she’d even gotten to the earring itself. When Ronja finally ripped the earring off, she found that the third earring had come away as well, clinging loosely to the ribbons of flesh she’d torn away from her own ear. A part of her hated it – she _had_ killed Thunder, after all, even if she hadn’t killed the other two, so she’d originally intended on keeping that one earring for him – but she let both earrings fall to the ground with a noise that was far too wet for Ronja’s liking. She could feel blood starting to slide down the side of her face, a few more ambitious drops trailing down to her jaw and dripping onto her shoulder. Her ear _hurt,_ which she supposed made sense; it was more of a dull throb now than the sharp pain of reducing her ear to tatters with her own claws.

Ronja reached up to start to brush some of her tears away and try to collect herself before Flint and Kali got back, maybe make an attempt and thinking up a way to explain this without worrying them too much, then paused when she caught sight of her hand. Her fingers were coated in blood, red staining her fur and turning it to a dark, sticky rust color. Ronja stared at it for a long moment, feeling like her brain was full of static. Fuck, how was she even going to explain this? Kali and Flint were bound to be back soon, and she didn’t think they’d buy any story she could think up. As it so often did, the thought of slipping into the crowd and disappearing, being halfway across the country before anyone even realized she was gone, flickered to life, but she crushed it as soon as it appeared. She wasn’t going to run from the best thing that had happened to her in years. She was self-destructive, sure, but not to such an extreme degree. She would happily drink any alcohol she could get her hands on, but she wasn’t going to abandon her friends like that. Ronja was tired of lying, anyway. She dropped her hand into her lap – it wouldn’t be the first time she’d gotten blood on her skirt – and tilted her head back against the wall, staring emptily at the ceiling. She’d just tell them the truth, she decided. Flint already knew about the lengths she’d had to go to in order to survive; what was one more awful secret?

At this point, Ronja just closed her eyes and contemplated going downstairs to get a drink. Probably not the best idea, covered in her own blood and her ear in tatters as it was. Instead, Ronja just sat there, letting the tears fall without bothering to wipe them away. There was no point in trying to stop them anyway, not when Boar’s words were still echoing in her skull. It wasn’t even the words that had really hurt, but the unbridled disgust in his eyes and he’d said them. _You are nothing like the woman I fell in love with._

 _No,_ Ronja thought, _I’m not._ She hadn’t been lying when she told Boar that Stream had died when Thunder had. Stream had been buried alongside her son, along with all her naivety and any hope she’d had of going home. The last five years had changed her irrevocably, in the most fundamental of ways. Stream had been too young and frightened and foolish to survive, so Ronja had spent the last five years trying with every fiber of her being to distance herself from all that. She couldn’t afford to let Stream’s weakness linger when every day had been a tooth-and-nail fight to be alive, especially when she’d spent so long refusing to use her magic. It had taken a toll, after a while, hiding her magic like that. But distancing herself from her old life had never worked the way she’d wanted it to, and Ronja thought maybe she’d finally figured out why. She had her own grief, now; she didn’t need to hold on to Stream’s anymore.

It was about time that Stream’s regret joined her in the grave.


End file.
